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Smoothing out the edges

Group makes twin pine hill safer and cleaner

Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Jun 06/01) - You could do a lot of grumbling picking broken glass off Twin Pine Hill.

Noticing shards of glass in every nook and cranny on the hill makes you wonder if ever there was a bottle drunk on the hill that didn't end up on the rocks. You wonder about the loutish bravado behind each toss and how the effects of an instant of stupidity last hundreds of years.

This is probably what everybody would have been thinking about Sunday morning if it had been raining. But the sun shone down and the hill sparkled.

'Everybody' was the 13 people who collectively removed, in the estimation of organizer Gary Tait, one-tenth of one per cent of the glass on the hill.

Though it orbited the monumental job being undertaken, talk during the two hours of pickin' was pretty light. Mountain bikes, a 'Dude, you were so loaded' story, the bear attack, mountain biking, camping.

Glass or not, it was a great day to be out on the rocks, overlooking the spread of Old Town and the end of Yellowknife Bay.

"I didn't mind being out there doing what I was doing today at all," said Tait. Few there would disagree. The rocks were warm, the bugs had not woken up yet and the view was spectacular.

For those unaware of it, Twin Pine Hill is the rocky promontory that rises from the right side of Franklin Avenue as you head down the hill to Old Town. At the Old Town end is smooth rideable rock, culminating in a precipitous 40-metre drop snowboarders slide down and mountain bikers ride up. It's an area known as 'The Playground' to mountain bikers and snowboarders that use it.

"It's a green area, but it's not a place to walk your dog," said Tait. "You wouldn't get far before your dog's feet were cut to shreds."

This year's cleanup follows one undertaken by two residents last year. A loosely-organized group, the pickers included mountain bikers, students, Coun. Robert Hawkins, employees of Overlander Sports and members of the Yellowknife Multi-Sport club.

Tait asked for and received brooms, gloves and dust pans from Home Hardware, Corruthers Building Supplies and Canadian Tire.

The group removed two full-sized garbage cans of glass from the hill, plus two garbage bags of plastic bottles for recycling.